Antonio Sausys MA CMT RYT

If you've experienced profound loss-be it the death of a loved one or the end of an important relationship - you may feel intense emotional or physical pain. In fact, it's not uncommon for grieving people to experience depression, anxiety, fatigue, and a variety of chronic ailments. If you've tried medication or therapy but have yet to find relief, you may be surprised to discover the healing effects of yoga. Yoga for Grief Relief combines over 100 illustrations of gentle yogic poses and the latest research in psychophysiology and neuroscience to help you get back on the path to wellness. Written by Antonio Sausys, TV host of YogiViews and the founder of Yoga for Health, an International Yoga Therapy Conference, the step-by-step exercises in this book can be tailored to your personal needs, and are designed to help you work through your loss and begin on the journey to self-knowledge and enlightenment. Grief affects both the mind and the body. Using the examples and illustrations in this book, you'll discover how the ancient practice of yoga can provide relief for both your emotional and physical symptoms. The book also explains the psychophysiological correlation between emotional grief and bodily pain that may also arise. The gentle yoga practices within include postures, breathing exercises, body movements, cleansing techniques, self-relaxation techniques, and mind reprogramming exercises. At its core, yoga is about accepting change. If you are ready to heal, this book can provide the necessary tools needed to make a meaningful transition in life with graceful awareness.… (altro)

This review is also posted here: http://readingthething.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/review-on-yoga-and-grief-and-dis...

Title: Yoga for Grief Relief: Simple Practices for Transforming Your Grieving Mind and Body
Author: Antonio Sausys
Source: Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review
Tl;dr: Woo. Woo, woo, woo. More woo. Did I mention this book had woo? And some yoga.

"We don’t get over our losses, we transform our relationship to them"

My way of working through things in life, is to read about them. Right now, I’m grieving because my father passed away a few months ago. This means I’m reading about loss and grief a lot. I also really enjoy yoga, so when I saw this book on Netgalley, I was really interested. Sadly, it turned out this book was not the right book for me.

First, this book does have some strong points. I really liked the normalizing of grief (however you experience it, is completely fine and normal) and the diverse cultural outlook the books shows. The writing itself was very easily readable, which is quite an accomplishment, espcially about such a potentially difficult topic. Although I would have preferred more extensive yoga routines, I think the breathing excercises and a routine that seems like some sort of extensive body scan can be really nice and soothing.

However, I am incredibly allergic to woo, and this book had a lot of it. I am a sceptic and a scientist (a social scientist, with a MSc in Behavioural Science/Psychology), and one of the bigger crimes you can commit in my eyes, is placing science on the same level as superstition and pseudoscience. The author writes about certain exercises doing stuff to certain hormones, and the influence on your emotions with scientific references. And then suddenly, he talks about chakra’s and asking things from the universe (“the secret” territory), seemingly placing them on the same level as the science he just mentioned. And the science that he uses, is dubious as well. I looked at the sources, and most are books (which means it is potentially not peer reviewed, which means it might not be sound science) and the scientific papers come from magazines that do not seem familiar to me at all, so they might not be the best as well. Yes, this is speculative from my side, but it makes me doubt all the claims he makes about the benefits of his program.

So: don’t read this (when it comes out on June 1 this year). Maybe do the routines, if you feel like it’s up your alley, but despite the nice readability, the wading through woo is not worth it.… (altro)